Cool Cat Teacher™ - Vicki Davis , Cool Cat Teacher Blog Becoming a 21st Century School or District: Use the 4Cs to Support Teachers Welcome back to our series on becoming a 21st century school or district. For the earlier installments of this series, please scroll to the bottom of this page. We have covered a lot of ground since we started this 7 step series. We have talked about embracing the 4Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity) and embedding them in professional development (step 4), and curriculum and assessment (step 5). Engage Your Teachers Your 21st century education initiative rests upon your ability to engage and support every teacher in their practice around the 4Cs. Give them a copy of "Preparing Our Students for the 21st Century: An Educator's Guide to the Four Cs" from the National Education Association. Help teachers visualize 21st century classroom practice by showing them videos of 21st century classrooms. Help Teachers Focus on Student Work Consider organizing one or more professional development sessions around the sharing and discussion of 4Cs student work. Conclusion
Taming Information Chaos with the Power of 2.0 We Asked for 2.0 Libraries and We Got 2.0 Librarians « The Other Librarian We are closing in on a year after the September 1st article in Library Journal proposing a “new model of library service” called “Library 2.0.” Unless you have been asleep in your library duties, you ought to know that Library 2.0 calls for things like user-centered change, reduced institutional boundaries, and a heightened awareness of social software and related technologies. My sense is that the prominence of the Library 2.0 moniker has plateaued and we are about to see put it in with nostalgia-inducing sayings such as “groovy” and “smashing.” No Guff, it was all Hype The success of library 2.0, as is to be expected, has been mixed. Examples of Librarian 2.0 changing Librarians As I’ve said, while we called for changes in libraries we actually got changes in librarians. There’s no doubt that Library 2.0 got librarians to learn about themselves and the world of information they live in. The ILS Many libraries depend on vendors to provide library 2.0 innovations for them. Gaming Like this:
TPACK iPad Project In Schools (TIPS) | Dr Jenny Lane – Edith Cowan University Leveraging Technology for Learning Some reflections on digital learning: Today is the 3rd annual Digital Learning Day. Actually, it was yesterday, but we were snowed in, so let’s pretend it’s today. Seeing that winter weather has wreaked havoc on the best laid lesson plans this week, rather than encourage you to try incorporating a new digital learning tool you’ve never used before into a lesson, I thought I’d make a different suggestion as a way to celebrate Digital Learning Day. And it’s easy. Just…think about digital learning. That’s right, just think about it. Think about how the term itself is redundant, considering the Digital Age we live in, where pretty much anything you want to know, like right now, can be found on the Internet. Among other things, many not so good, the Internet is a place for learning, containing incredible troves of information…you just have to know how and where to search for it. The Internet’s also got a lot of spurious content, not to mention some missing pieces and loads of bias.
What exactly does a 21st century teacher librarian do? A list of curated topics in Scoop.it « Melbourne High School Library On the topic of the teacher librarians’ role and exactly what it is we TLs do in our jobs, I wanted to share this article in The Guardian: Beyond books: what it takes to be a 21st century librarian. We all know that there’s more to being a librarian than stamping books, as the subtitle of the article states. How bothered are we by the fact that a large proportion of our school communities have little idea what we do? If we stopped the next person walking by on the street and asked them what our jobs as librarians involve, we’d be willing to bet that their first answer would be stamping books. I think the same can be said of school libraries although it varies greatly depending on the interaction between teacher librarians and teaching staff. If anyone ever thought they’d become a librarian because they liked books or reading, they would be sorely disappointed if they did not also like people too. It’s not something which can be answered in a simple sentence. e-Books – Carmel Galvin
The Next Big Thing is Web 3.0. Catch It If You Can The Reading Warehouse is America's #1 book source for Teachers and Schools.